CHARLOTTESVILLE — Chaos and violence turned to tragedy Saturday as hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members — planning to stage what they described as their largest rally in decades to “take America back” — clashed with counterprotesters in the streets and a car plowed into crowds, leaving one person dead and 19 others injured.
Hours later, two state police officers died when their helicopter crashed at the outskirts of town. Officials would not confirm their identities nor whether the crash was related to Saturday’s protests.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), who had declared a state of emergency in the morning, said at an evening news conference that he had a message for “all the white supremacists and the Nazis who came into Charlottesville today: Go home. You are not wanted in this great commonwealth.”
Maurice Jones, Charlottesville’s African American city manager, looked stricken as he spoke: “Hate came to our town today in a way that we had feared but we had never really let ourselves imagine would.”
Charlottesville is my home town. I was born there, raised there and I married there. My parents met there. My family has been there for 8 generations, at least. This violence and chaos breaks my heart.
European immigration problems make ours look like a walk in the park. According to the Washington Post:
BRUSSELS — Thousands of refugees, most fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, have been snaking northward through the Balkans in recent days, confronting a Europe woefully unprepared to deal with them at every step.
Most endured a perilous crossing to Greece aboard rafts and boats, some barely fit to sail. They traversed Greece, a nation paralyzed by economic crisis and too poor to handle a flow of people that in July hit a record high. At the border with Macedonia late last week, they trudged through a wall of riot police, who fought them back with tear gas before relenting. Now, the asylum-seekers, thousands a day, are racing into Hungary, which is rushing to complete a barbed-wire border fence by the end of the month to force them to seek other routes.
It is a long parade of misery unparalleled in Europe in recent years. But the continent has so far failed to agree how to respond. Amid a refugee crisis that by some measures is the worst since World War II, individual nations are being left to improvise their own measures. In Hungary, that is taking the form of 108 miles of barbed wire and fencing.
The crisis is shaking fundamental tenets of European life, including the principle of free movement between most of the nations of the European Union. It is fueling a surge of anti-migrant sentiment in the countries that are housing the bulk of the asylum-seekers, Germany and Sweden. And it is straining the weakest countries, such as Greece, that are on migration’s front lines.
“Unless we do something, we will become a lifeboat sinking under the weight of people holding on to it and drowning everybody, both those seeking help and those offering help,” said Janos Lazar, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff, at a ceremony last week celebrating the founding of Hungary.
Sonia Nazario has been to Central America and has ridden The Beast for 3 months. She was there 10 years ago and she has gone back more recently. She followed one young chap named Enrique in order to write her book, Enrique’s Journey. Enrique’s Journey is about a young boy who made a journey across several countries to reunite with his mother who had left him when he was 5. Nazario tells us that 10 years ago, poverty and the desire to reunite with family drove children to come to the United States. Now she says things have changed. Enrique’s Journey is not a newly released documentary. Read More
I am going to advance a hypothesis. Local people who feel threatened by the refugee children from Central America are the same people who were anti-immigration to start with, you know, back in the day. Yes, the people who smugly went around touting “Illegal is illegal” and feeling like they had just made some sort of deep observation or said something profound. What does surprise me is the fact that these same people are now attacking children. How stupid on my part. Why am I surprised!? Read More
Kansas State coach Frank Martin always makes it a point to recruit a Latino high school ball player from overseas every year.
Martin, who is Cuban, knows that the islands of Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and countless others have talent that many U.S. coaches pass over.
But when he brings these players to the states, the last thing he’d ever expect was the treatment one of his players received at the foul line in the school’s opening game of the NCAA Tournament yesterday.
Freshman point guard Angel Rodriguez, who was born and raised in Puerto Rico, was at the foul-line when the Southern Mississippi University {sic} band began chanting “Where’s your green card?”
Holy cow! Are college students from University of Southern Mississippi really this rude and ignorant? Puerto Ricans are American citizens. They don’t need green cards. Even if they did, who is really that rude?
Last week the immigration issue kept creeping back into the conversations on here. Well let’s have at it.
Church leaders in Alabama are suing the state over their new bundle of anti-immigration laws. Why? The churches say that the laws prevent them from doing what churches do–minister to the poor. Some religions leaders say, as the law stands, that they could be arrested for feeding an immigrant or helping in times of sickness. In other words, they feel that the Alabama government in interfering with the separation of church and state.
Alabama has legislated new laws based on the F.A.I.R. model, similar to those first passed in the July 2007 Resolution here in PWC. These might even be more draconian.
Meanwhile, in Hoover Alabama, tea party forces support the new law:
The season’s final presentation of the Immigration & Human Rights Cinema is scheduled for 2:30 Sunday May 8 in the Verizon Auditorium of George Mason University’s Prince William Campus. The documentary, “The Minutemen” by Corey Wascinski, provides startling insights into the motivations and interactions of four Minutemen on the Arizona border.
As always, the screening is free and open to the public. Parking is available in the Occoquan Lot across from the Verizon Auditorium.
The town of Herndon apparently takes its poll pooches seriously. This great dane puts in an appearance at every Herndon election according to sources. He was there bright and early this morning when the polls opened at 6:30. (above picture from 2008)
I also understand that one of the founders of Help Save Herndon is on the ballot for town council. Hopefully our Herndon friends will keep us apprised of how election day is going over in Herndon. After viewing the town council meetings, it appears that peace and tranquility isn’t part of the main objective.
Is that a donkey lying down or a great dane running for office on the Jones’ sign? Perhaps he will further explain this logo on the candidate website:
That darling of the nativist crew, Tom Tancredo, opened the Tea Party Convention in Nashville last weekend with a litany of insults towards President Obama, John McCain, and the culture of multiculturalism (whatever that means).
The opening-night speaker at first ever National Tea Party Convention ripped into President Obama, Sen. John McCain and “the cult of multiculturalism,” asserting that Obama was elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.”
The speaker, former Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., told about 600 delegates in a Nashville, Tenn., ballroom that in the 2008 election, America “put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House … Barack Hussein Obama.”
Tancredo did not stop at the Democratic president — ripping McCain, R-Ariz., the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, for shaping up to be a repeat of “Bush 1 and Bush 2.”
“Thank God John McCain lost the election,” he said, voicing his belief that McCain would have presided over big budgets and lacked a tough stand against immigration.
Tancredo served 10 years in the House of Representatives and made a name for himself with his ardent opposition to immigration. He believes the 2008 election served to galvanize the right.
“This is our country,” he told the crowd. “Let’s take it back.”
Is anyone else uncomfortable with Tancredo’s words? Calling the president of the United States a “committed socialist ideologue” is disturbing. One wonders who he means when he says ‘our.’
Tancredo further described the American electorate as “people who cannot even spell the word vote, or say it in English.” Additionally, he called for a culture war in the name of preserving “Judeo-Christian principles whether people like it or they don’t.”
His rhetoric is unacceptable to many Americans. Hopefully the Tea Party people or whatever they want to be called will reject this kind of political mentality. It certainly doesn’t represent MY America. It is still unclear exactly who these folks are or what they want. To the best of our knowledge, and looking at who seems to identify with them, the Tea Party folks seem to be to the right of Republicans. Tancredo, Bachmann, Beck and Palin would fit this description. However, Scott Brown does not. It is expected that they will kick him to the curb now he is no longer needed to prove a point. Brown seems far too moderate and more like John McCain or William Weld.
Many of our contributors defend the Tea Party with their last breath. How do you see the Tea Party? What is their cause? Are they simply a grass organization? If so, why are there so many groups? Are they a populist group similar to the Perot people? Is there one definition of this group or does each splinter group have its own persona?
Sheriff Joe has accused Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon of attempting to neuter his immigration law enforcement. Now where have we heard that?
It seems that Mayor Gordon has called on Sheriff Joe to denounce neo-Nazis. Sheriff Joe countered that he has no associations with neo-nazis or far right extremists. Mayor Gordon has concerns over people allegedly seen giving the Nazi salute to Sheriff Joe.
Additionally, Sheriff Joe allegedly has been seen and photographed at Anti-immigration rallies with neo-Nazis, according to KTAR 92.3 FM. A recent Phoenix New Timesstory supposedly showed the sheriff posing with some of these characters.
[that] Gordon wants to neuter his enforcement of immigration laws.
“I do not support any neo-Nazi hate groups. He knows it,” Arpaio told KTAR and other media outlets. “I don’t have to apologize because I never have been connected with any of these associations, and the people know that.”
I suppose I would question the wisdom of an elected offical going to an anti-immigration rally. I am not sure that the Phoenix New Times is top-notch journalism either, at first glance. There are pictures, but each case could be coincidental. I get the distinct impression, at first glance, that Phoenix New Times has no love affair with Sheriff Joe. There is an entire Arpaio Archive in the paper dedicated to him.
Perhaps if Sheriff Joe stuck to law enforcement rather than trying to whip up the masses at anti-immigration rallies, he wouldn’t have to deal with this kind of insinuation.
Don’t shoot me. I am a mere messenger. I come in peace. Neither Anti-Bvbl or I have accused Sheriff Joe of anything, much less being a neo-Nazi sympathizer or a far right extremist. I do not think he is either of those. I find the scrapping and sparring between him and the mayor ironic as well as the choice of words. Does anyone get a sense of YING and YANG?
Every once in a while, an article or opinion piece comes along that just cannot be retold or summarized. This one you have to read for yourself, in its entirety. It will all look all too familiar.
From the New York Times:
The relentlessly harsh Republican campaign against immigrants has always hidden a streak of racialist extremism. Now after several high-water years, the Republican tide has gone out, leaving exposed the nativism of fringe right-wingers clinging to what they hope will be a wedge issue.
Last week at the National Press Club in Washington, a group seeking to speak for the future of the Republican Party declared that its November defeats in Congressional races stemmed not from having been too hard on foreigners, but too soft.
The group, the American Cause, released a report arguing that anti-immigration absolutism was still the solution for the party’s deep electoral woes, actual voting results notwithstanding. Rather than “pander to pro-amnesty Hispanics and swing voters,” as President Bush and Karl Rove once tried to do, the report’s author, Marcus Epstein, urged Republicans to double down on their efforts to run on schemes to seal the border and drive immigrants out. Read More
